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Comment by ehnto | Hacker News Reader

Unsurprisingly all search engines seem to be struggling with AI content sites as well. It's rare to get human articles, sometimes rare to even get authorative websites. It's frequently a bot site with a plausible enough name like, potterspainterly.com or medhealthdirect or something with oddly specific articles written in the last year.

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This is the root problem. The idea that Google is deliberately sabotaging search seems far less likely than the idea that the internet is mostly garbage and SEO slop.

perhaps this would not be a problem if google did not directly monetize AI Slop... for that matter why even include AI crap in search.

The Google conspiracy has been getting shared for long before AI slop came in to the picture.

The fact is that SEO people got too good at their jobs and filled the search results with junk.

Google can properly classify email spam.

They should be able to fight this as well.

Problem is they are the ones funding the poor quality spam and they're in turn profiting by taking money from advertisers.

Spamming can be found by metadata and reports. There is no "this site is absolute crap" button for them to find useful feedback in searches.

They've had 20+ years to add one.

Add? They have one. Click on the three dots next to the URL then "Feedback" -> "Something else" -> "Spammy content".

Something like this has existed as long as I can remember. The three dots used to be a down arrow in the same place.

Even better then.

Google used to penalize websites for SEO hacks. Then they started attending SEO conferences themselves. SEO specialists didn't outsmart Google, Google stopped trying. As the sibling implies this is most likely because they noticed that the easiest way for SEO spam to monetize is ... Google ads.

Google won't index my blog but has no problem indexing AI slop site number 9001. The problem is Google and it's a policy choice.

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